Hello, friends.

On the second-to-last Monday in July, I found myself pressed into a Denver International Airport train car at one in the morning with more strangers than a fire marshal would care to know about. The East Coast thunderstorms and flooding had canceled countless flights, and most of us had spent the previous 48 hours rebooking, sprinting, and brainstorming with ever-patient and exceedingly tolerant gate agents.

One man held the door for @TheRealDanCraig and me as we ran for it, even though holding that door cost him more space he didn’t have and sleep he must have wanted. Finally, we packed into that train car so tightly that most of us didn’t have a pole or a strap to hold onto.

It didn’t matter. No one could fall over. We were pressed inside, held up by each other.

And then something happened that I flat didn’t expect at 1 a.m. among the exhausted and recently stranded: people started cracking jokes. About when they’d last showered. About the airport burrito one man had just inhaled, and what he was afraid that might mean for the rest of us. Laughter rippled through the car. Hands reached out to help more people aboard or keep them from toppling when a suitcase became a tripping hazard.

Nobody was “networking.” No one was “building a personal brand” or “positioning themselves for promotion.” And still, in the least comfortable transit experience of my year, I watched a crowd of strangers take care of each other with ease and humor.

It was a single moment in our 48-hour travel epic, but I keep thinking about that train because it surprised me so much.

And apparently, I’m not alone. Jamil Zaki’s lab at Stanford found that we consistently underestimate how warm the people around us really are. When his team conducted surveys on campus, nearly everyone scored themselves high in empathy while indicating they thought their peers were much colder.1

We walk around braced for indifference. Then weather disrupts a ton of flights, and we find ourselves surprised by the kindness of strangers.

What almost a hundred conversations have shown me

Each spring and summer, I conduct 75-100 Emotional Intelligence assessments, then sit down with each participant to debrief their results. It’s one of the great privileges of my year: that many deep, personal conversations about what it means to understand ourselves and each other.

“I always thought empathy was super good,” one participant told me, “but there’s this other side of it that can be really depleting and pull me away from other things I want to do.”

Another put it this way: “I think empathy is my biggest strength, but people-pleasing is my biggest weakness. I just go too far with that empathy.”

If you’re the person others turn to first, at work, at home, in the book club or pickle ball friend group, you may recognize that sentiment. You care, people know you care, and then they start to show up at your door indiscriminately, which starts to cost you. So, to protect your time and energy, you begin to wonder how to care less.

It seems reasonable, but caring less is not what we need. The question doesn’t have to be how do I curb my empathy or just care less? Instead, we might ask ourselves what exactly it is about the caring that exhausts us?

Empathy is not the same as absorbing

Neuroscientists Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki call the exhaustion that’s so familiar to so many of us empathic distress, which they define as the involuntary absorbing of another person’s pain until it becomes our own.2 In their brain imaging studies, empathic distress and compassion activate different neural networks entirely. Distress depletes us and drives us to withdraw from others. Compassion (which they define as understanding someone’s feelings while staying rooted in our own) restores us and moves us toward connection.

That distinction is important because of its impact on our energy, and because empathy has components we can practice separately. Researchers differentiate between cognitive empathy, which is understanding what someone feels and why, and affective empathy, which is feeling it alongside them. And Zaki’s earlier work makes the case that all of it is trainable: empathy is a skill we build like a muscle, rather than a biological trait we either have or don’t.3

As many of you know, I’ve been performing improv for almost 20 years, and I leverage it in a lot of the leadership workshops I design not only because it’s fun, but also because the research backs it up. One study of 165 healthcare students found that a single one- to two-hour improv session produced substantial gains in their empathy for one another.4 It makes sense when you consider what improv requires: no matter how much you want to, you can’t plan your next line so you have to give the other person your whole attention, take in what they offer, and build on it in real time. “Yes, And” builds our empathy because it’s innately risky. We’re working without a net, inventing things on the spot (sometimes in front of a paying audience), which forces us to act in the face of uncertainty, continue in directions others start, and trust our scene partners. Turns out, we get better at all that with practice.

Reading does something similar, from the comfort of what I like to call my Coffee Chair. One influential study in Science found that people who read a passage of literary fiction did better afterward on tasks measuring their ability to read others’ emotions and intentions than people who read nonfiction or popular fiction.5 To be fair, the single-session finding has apparently had a rough time in replication (and I’d science-ticiously argue that it feels to me as if popular fiction also places us in the experiences and circumstances of others, so it stands to reason it would also build empathy, a claim with which this next study appears to agree).

What’s held up more is the longitudinal study that shows people who read more fiction over their lifetimes demonstrate higher empathy and social understanding than those who don’t, most likely because fiction transports us into characters’ lives.6 We may not agree with their motivations or actions, but we tend to understand them. Which is to say that all those nights in elementary school when you snuck a flashlight into your room to read Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys under the covers, you were actually building your leadership capacity. (Yes!)

When I talk about empathy as both distinct from absorbing and also a skill that we can learn, it often seems like a relief to people. The choice feels untenable when we think it’s between caring and surviving. But recognizing we can empathize at choice feels much more reasonable. We can choose to lean all the way in with our best friend at midnight and stay respectful but rooted with the colleague who treats every Tuesday like an emergency.

Strategic empathy

Daniel Goleman, one of the world’s foremost experts on Emotional Intelligence (EI), including empathy, has repeatedly made the evidence-based case that EI is what distinguishes outstanding leaders from merely competent ones.7 Dr. Brené Brown posits that not only is that still relevant today, but also that in a period of time as uncertain as ours, steadiness and genuine connection are the fundamental basis for leadership.8 And those working with stakes as high as hostage negotiation train in and teach what they call tactical empathy: naming what the other person feels, accurately and out loud, as the fastest route to trust.9 Of course, naming what the other person feels accurately depends on reading their emotions accurately, and Paul Ekman has demonstrated that we can learn that skill, too.10

But the most persuasive evidence I have shows up in reflective conversations organically. One debrief participant, thinking back on their brutal year, told me: “Having the experience of not having everything go my way has led to my empathy increasing.”

They’d been knocked down a few times, and instead of disengaging, they grew in their ability to really understand what it might feel like for someone else to get knocked down, even if the circumstances of their setback were completely different from their own. That awareness will help them lead every team they ever work with.

And another participant said something that I would have sworn was straight out of a Brene Brown animated short if I wasn’t there when it happened: “It’s the biggest gift in the world when someone trusts you enough to be vulnerable with you.”

The biggest gift in the world.

Back on the train

The man who held the door for us made a deliberate decision that cost him something small and also sparked authentic connection. We exchanged a joke as I thanked him, and then joined with others in turning a car full of tired strangers into a brief, laughing community.

He saw our running, read our faces, understood our dilemma, and chose to help. Empathy in about three seconds, start to finish.

So, I’ll leave you with the two questions that man on the train left me with:

• Where in your life are you absorbing when you could be empathizing?

• Who’s held a door for you lately, and for whom have you held one?

I stepped off that train feeling grateful. For the man who held the door, for the common humanity in the unapologetic burrito joke, and for the reminder that we are held up by each other far more often than we may think.

Onward for us all,
Katy

1. Goldfish, the band — I went to a rooftop show in Denver for a band I’d never heard of, learning just that they’d played Red Rocks twice as I moved through the crowd to stand in front of the stage. So, when two men walked out, everyone screamed, and the duo started their set, I turned to our friend and asked, "It’s just two guys?" Yes, Goldfish is just two guys: Dominic Peters and David Poole, jazz-trained musicians from Cape Town who amp up live saxophone, flute, keyboard, and bass through audio tech I don’t understand. And their fans are on fire. A few of them in their late-20’s/early 30’s had 3D-printed their own foot-long orange goldfish they’d rigged with LED lights powered by pocket-sized battery packs. They raised them above their heads to swim to the music, passing them amongst others in the crowd to share in the joy of them. The man directly in front of me, in his 60’s and wearing a Hawaiian shirt and straw hat, turned to ask if he was blocking my view. I told him no, I was worried I was yelling in his ear. He pointed at his earplugs, asked if I'd seen the band before, and when I said no and that I was having the best time, he reached into his pocket, pulled out an inch-long plastic goldfish with articulated scales, and handed it to me. I could feel the delight on my own face: wide eyes, ridiculous grin. He smiled as I thanked him, then swam away into the mix of people. Researchers have measured what happens to a crowd during a live music performance: their heart and respiration rates align, and they move in sync with others. This strengthens both felt and measured social connection. Which is a clinical way to describe the impact of a happily crowded roof, a saxophone, and a school of plastic fish.

2. Kara Penn’s book launch — At the end of July I went to RedLine Contemporary Art Center for the launch of Eggshell | Embryo, Kara Penn’s debut collection of poems. Kara is an impressive friend and colleague. She founded and runs Mission Spark, where she consults with nonprofits, government agencies, and foundations; she co-authored Fail Better for Harvard Business Review Press; she lives here in Denver with her husband and four daughters, celebrating holidays with the most magical decorations and feasts. And she wrote a powerful book of poems. She didn’t choose one lane and focus exclusively there. She pursued multiple passions, with dedication and perseverance. For. Years. The poems genuinely moved me, as did the launch party: friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors who chose to gather in a gallery and listen to words and music from burgeoning artists. We so often talk about creative practice as requiring discipline, which it does. And it’s also sustained and celebrated in community. As a result, I’ve been asking myself more intentionally who I’ve shown up for lately, and how I’ve shown up for my craft.

3. Pass the Pigs — Eight hours at the airport could test a friendship, but somewhere in the middle of our recent weather delay, a friend reached into his pocket and produced two small plastic pigs. And not only did I not think this was strange, but I was overjoyed. I had last seen this game thirty-five years ago, and had searched for it since. You see, my grandparents in Iowa kept exactly two games in their basement, both involving pigs. One was a bingo-ish spinner game I remember as something like “Don’t Let the Pig in the Garden,” where you earned 3D plastic vegetables for your card until the spinner betrayed you and a large fake pig moved in and ate one. The other was this. David Moffat created it, and Recycled Paper Products published it in 1977 as Pig Mania! before Milton Bradley renamed it (explaining my inability to find it through my analog searches over the last 3.5 decades). But whatever you call it, the game remains fully capable of making grown adults shriek in a terminal. You roll the pigs for points based on how they land: Trotters, Razorbacks, Snouters, the Double Leaning Jowler. You can press your luck, bank your points, lose your turn, or lose everything to two pigs touching (something the video here calls an Oinker; but the original Pig Mania! called Makin’ Bacon). I’m still reveling in the serendipity of the coincidence: a canceled flight, a friend with pigs in his pocket, and shooting back thirty-five years in time like I just fell through a wormhole.

4. The authorized biography of Audrey Hepburn — My knowledge of Audrey Hepburn was admittedly pretty superficial until recently: a black dress, a holiday in Rome with Gregory Peck who I’d loved in To Kill a Mockingbird, and gazing dreamily through the window of Tiffany’s. Intimate Audrey, written by her son Sean Hepburn Ferrer with Wendy Holden, has been a welcome expansion of what I thought I knew. Sure, Kirkus has rightly called the book “genial if lopsided” and has warned that a son writing about his mom is going to leave some things out. But maybe because it currently feels like my 13-year-olds are decidedly and irrevocably biased against me, I’m enjoying what the Wall Street Journal has called a “beautifully written, heartfelt tribute.” Two things I didn’t know: how persistent her self-doubt was despite decades of acclaim, and how much of her life she dedicated to humanitarian work. She lived through WWII as a child in Nazi-occupied Holland, carried messages for the Dutch resistance, and survived the famous Hongerwinter of 1944-45. Decades later, she served as a UNICEF ambassador, visiting Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia to raise awareness and aide. What strikes me is the alignment we can see when viewing a life in its totality like this. Here was a woman praised in life and immortalized since as a fashion and beauty icon, who seems to have never quite believed it, who told her son she always worried she’d lose those close to her, and who turned down the role of Anne Frank due to her post-war trauma, and then found work that let her put her own memory of hunger and fear to use helping others.

5. Patch Summer (For Adults Who Want to Try Something New) — My sister handed me a Girl Scout patch last week that made me laugh out loud. There, in yellow embroidery thread it read: Bike Safety. This, after the crash I wrote about in July’s post, which involved neither safety nor much dignity. My sister said I’d earned it, and I felt so seen. 😊 I also loved being reminded of the movement I’d read about a couple months ago and let pass from my awareness. Apparently, a TikTok by a Washington, D.C. woman (AsToldByIndie) went viral after she posted in May about buying activity patches and earning them by getting together and doing a series of fun things with friends (craft night, the zoo, Renaissance Festival, whatever you pick). Indie was never a Girl Scout herself but says that shouldn’t hold anyone back, as it’s easy for anyone to do. For her part, she irons each patch onto a cheap canvas tote bag as her version of a scrapbook to her intentionally doing more things off screens and out in the world with friends. I love this for reasons I can defend professionally: a goal we can mark with a tangible acknowledgment, witnessed by someone who cares whether we do it, is far more likely to be one we accomplish than one we silently consider doing in our heads. And encouraging ourselves to gather with friends in real-time and in nature or novel environments supports our health, wellbeing, and growth. Also, fun. I haven’t dedicated a tote bag to this myself, but my Bike Safety Patch is living happily on my desk next to my red apple from The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere and my newly acquired plastic goldfish as reminders of the power of whimsy and human connection.

NOTE: Please know that nothing I share is a paid endorsement. I just talk about what I’m really captivated by and curious about each month. Hence the randomness. 😊 To that end, please comment or message me if you have any rabbit holes you recommend I disappear down for a bit. I’m always looking for new and interesting things to get absorbed in.

Are you a woman looking for this kind of emotional exploration while working through what you want to create next in your life?*

We have a couple spots left in our upcoming 6-mo program that kicks off with a 3-day Immersive in Montana from September 23rd to 26th.

^{*Our group welcomes all women, including cis and trans women.}

Learn More

All the ways to work with me:

One-on-One Coaching — Book a free info call
ICF Mentor Coaching — Join a cohort or sign up for 1:1
Custom Workshops — Learn more & design yours
Not sure which avenue is right for you? Send me a note.

Hello, friends.

Those of you who’ve been reading my rabbit holes know I decided a couple months ago to become a cyclist. For real this time.

So I’ve been training (not as much as I intended, but more than I’ve ridden in years) for a multi-day bike trip with @TheRealDanCraig. We finished two weeks ago, and it was fabulous.

Dan’s a great rider with multiple Leadville 100 finishes and a rare three-summit day on Mt. Ventoux. I mostly ride a stationary bike, which has the distinct advantage of almost never toppling over.

We rode 225 miles in four days, and I felt like such a badass (even with an e-bike’s significant assist). I was working hard. I was learning so much. I was setting new “personal bests” multiple times a day.

And then, 20 miles before the end of the whole endeavor, we approached an underpass with narrow lanes, head-on bike and pedestrian traffic, a blind right turn at the bottom of a hill going in, and a hard left coming out. So, I slowed down.

The biker behind me didn’t.

He flew around the corner and barreled down on me. I veered right: concrete wall. Left: oncoming lane, where I thought he was passing. Right again, over-corrected, hit gravel, and flew over the handlebars.

I ricocheted off my knees, landed hard on my left shoulder, and looked up just in time to see the concrete path rising to meet my face. My last thought before my chin raked the concrete was: “This is going to hurt.”

It did.

And I knew quickly: no broken bones. No broken teeth. No need for an ambulance.

I rehashed each one of my micro-reactions, searching for what I should have done differently.

Dan said, “Sometimes you just have bad luck.”

Then later, “I hope this doesn’t change your view of the whole trip.”

“No,” I said. “That guy does not get our trip.”

You see, in our family we have something called the Magic-Garbage Cycle. And I try very hard not to get trapped in it.

Where the name came from

When our twins were four, we set out to meet some out-of-state cousins at the zoo. Then their car broke down, and we had to pivot to an adventure park instead. We’d never been, and the kids had been looking forward to the zoo for days. So, one of them took the news hard. Tears. Yelling. The full four-year-old protest meal deal.

It turned out to be a phenomenal day. Seven joyous hours later, we poured two happy, worn-out kids into the car.

As we pulled onto the highway, I said to no one in particular, “Wow. That was magical.”

And a small voice piped up from the backseat: “Yeah! And I thought it was gonna be garbage!”

The false binary is seductive

High achievers are especially good at this (and I say that with love, because I am one, and because I coach a lot of you).

You’re the person others turn to first. At work, in a crisis, in the group text. You’ve spent a lifetime being the one who holds it together, who gets it right, who knows the answer. So when something goes sideways, your brain reaches for the fastest available story, and the fastest available story is almost always a verdict: I nailed it. I blew it. I’m doing so well! I’m an idiot who knows nothing.

There’s a reason for that reflex. Under stress, our range of responses narrows. Psychologists call it threat rigidity:¹ when we feel endangered, we default to fewer options, rehearsed behaviors, black-and-white thinking. It kept our ancestors alive. And it’s spectacularly unhelpful when the actual threat is just temporary soft tissue damage and a bruised ego.

Harvard psychologist Susan David has a name for the opposite of that reflex: emotional agility.2 In her research, the trap is getting hooked — letting a single thought or feeling drive your behavior before you’ve had a chance to consider it. I look like an idiot is a hook. He ruined the trip is a hook. And the other one I reached for on the pavement — I’m fine, it wasn’t his fault, no big deal — is a hook, too. David calls that one false positivity: rushing past a real feeling to slap a smile on it. Bottling counts as rigid. So does bulldozing straight to the bright side.

Here are four practices I use myself. Consistently.

• Re-establish safety — Use intentional breathing to move out of fight-or-flight. For me: inhaling for four, exhaling for six while repeating “I’m OK; I’m safe” as Dan pedaled to the pharmacy for gauze and medical tape. It felt cringey, but it worked.

• Name it to tame it3 — When a feeling shows up, say what it is, out loud or on paper: I’m embarrassed. I’m scared I look incompetent. Labeling an emotion with specificity has been shown to lower its charge. It moves the feeling from something that’s hijacking you to something you’re examining. And precision matters: “I’m frustrated” and “I’m humiliated and a little frightened” send you down very different roads.

• Put a comma where you assume there’s a period — Instead of “I’m not an athlete,” try “I’m thinking I’m not athletic.” One is a conclusion. The other is temporary.

• Get curious — As Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff wrote in her NYT Op-Ed this week, “The most important discoveries are often not the ones we set out to make.”4 More on this in a minute, because it’s my current favorite.

You can’t rush to the silver lining

This is where I sometimes lose people, so let me be clear: emotional flexibility is not toxic positivity in a Trojan horse.

You can’t sprint to the lesson. You can’t skip the part where it hurts. When you shove past the real feeling to get to a bite-sized takeaway, the feeling doesn’t leave; it just goes underground and files grievances to come back later.5 The magic isn’t earned by pretending the garbage never happened.

Almost nothing is 100% magic or 100% garbage. Or 100% anything. The trip was 225 glorious miles and one bad guy under a bridge. My recovery is twelve annoying weeks and a body that didn’t break when it easily could have. Both true. Same trip. The work is in not choosing a side, in letting it be the whole thing.

I’ve written down three things a day for years, along with what I did to help bring them about. So it didn’t take long, even sitting banged up, for a few genuinely appreciative thoughts to surface. The racer didn’t hit me (or run over me) after I went down. We were close to a town. I could get back on the bike. No thousands lost in medical bills, no days lost in a hospital. The accident didn’t stop us from doing a single thing we wanted to do.

The negative thoughts have crept back in over the last two weeks, and since I coach every day, you all have held me accountable for keeping my promises to myself. (Again, always, thank you.) I’ve acknowledged the self-doubt, frustration, and embarrassment, and also tried to keep them in perspective. I widened my focus to see the whole picture — which was there all along, even when I was only looking at one corner of it.

Humor helps

Back on the bike and pedaling toward our final destination, I looked over at Dan and said, “You know what just occurred to me? I’m riding this bike like a rental.”

He laughed. I laughed, which hurt, which made me laugh more.

That joke, like Dan’s reminder that everyone has bad luck, cracked the binary open. You can’t hold “This is a total catastrophe and I am a complete idiot!” with “I’m riding this bike like a rental” and not smile. The humor forced a third option into a headspace fighting to allow only two. It acknowledged the wreck without letting it eclipse the whole experience.

The curiosity I love to keep engaging

When something knocks me off my game — an inattentive racer, a hard conversation, a plan that breaks down on the way to the zoo — one of the questions I like to ask myself is: How might this be happening for me, instead of to me?

I want to be careful here: this question can curdle if you deploy it too fast. I don’t think the guy under the bridge was secretly a gift, nor do I embrace the platitude that everything happens for a reason. Some things are just bad, and the person who ran me off the road was just wrong.

So. What is this here to work in me? Maybe it’s an invitation to see how far I’ve come in pivoting out of the everything-is-garbage spiral when one thing goes wrong. Maybe it’s twelve weeks of slowing down and learning to accept help, which, if we’re being honest, is its own kind of edge for someone who has a bias for action and has built a life around helping. Maybe it’s just the curious exploration in this essay.

What I know is that considering the question reignites my agency, which means I succeed in the doing.

That racer doesn’t get our bike trip. But I can let him be a footnote in the story I choose to write going forward.

Onward for us all,

Katy

1. Berlin, in Layers — I spent a recent trip to Berlin, adjacent to the Downtown Denver Partnership Urban Exchange, holding two seemingly opposite things at once. My days went deep: hours at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and its companion museum, then over half a day at the Berlin Wall Memorial Visitors' and Documentation Centers before walking the outdoor exhibits along the largest remaining stretch of the Wall. My evenings went forward: dinners and drinks with people eager to talk about adaptive reuse architecture, arts and culture education, and sports complexes humming with life. At first I found the whiplash deeply unsettling. But the longer I held the tension, the more instructive I found it. Here is a city that has looked its own disturbing history full in the face — memorialized it in stone, in name, in the middle of prime real estate — and still chooses to build, create, and play next to it. Particularly as the historical rhetoric reverberates in our present, it feels important to remember that thoughtful reflection and meaningful forward motion each require the other.

2. Grüner Veltliner — Where I've been this summer, it’s been HOT, which has me reaching for chilled white wines. And because it reminds me of one of Catherine O’Hara’s best scenes in Schitt’s Creek, and I love an unassuming underdog, I've fallen for Grüner Veltliner (pronounced GROO-ner FELT-lee-ner, which is as fun to say as it is to drink in the backyard). This is the Austrian grape with a great origin story: apparently almost nobody outside Austria took it seriously until a now-famous London blind tasting in October 2002, when a panel of expert judges put a lineup of Grüners up against some of the world's most famous Chardonnays and the unpretentious, food-friendly drinker took top honors. Two decades later, it remains one of the great value bottles: crisp and happy alongside nearly anything on the table, and refreshingly unconcerned with its own reputation. There's a leadership metaphor in there about substance outperforming lineage when someone levels the playing field, but I'll (mostly) spare you.

3. The COACHBOCK — In 2025, the International Coaching Federation published a book with a name that only a professional association could love: the Coaching Body of Competencies and Knowledge, COACHBOCK for short. It's an attempt to write down, in one place, what the coaching profession knows — assembled by more than a hundred volunteer coaches from twenty-six countries. And I appreciate this genuinely collaborative labor of love: that many practitioners pooling their knowledge to help all coaches, and aspiring coaches, serve their clients better. I revel in the art of coaching (following intuition, partnering fully with clients, responding to whatever arises in a session). And grounding that art in the rigor of demonstrated competencies and evidence-based practice is where the real power lives. I’m geeking out accordingly, highlighter in hand.

4. Cape Verde's World Cup Run — Having come to sports late in life, my entry point has always been the human-interest angle, and I love a Cinderella story. The one that grabbed me this summer was Cape Verde, that small volcanic archipelago off the west coast of Africa with a population of about 525,000 (fewer people than live in the city of Denver) that walked into its first World Cup in June and didn't lose a single group game. They tied Spain (the reigning European champions), Uruguay, and Saudi Arabia; finished second in their group; and became the smallest nation ever to reach the World Cup knockout round. Their run may have ended in a 3–2 extra-time heartbreaker against Argentina, the reigning world champions, but that level of play is astonishing for a World Cup novice ranked 67th coming in, and defying expectation is its own kind of glory.

5. Mattering by Jennifer B. Wallace — A recent leadership retreat cohort started a self-organized book club, and their first pick was Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose by award-winning journalist Jennifer B. Wallace. Her central case is simple and firm: the feeling that we are valued and have the opportunity to add value is a core human need, one whose absence shows up as the loneliness and burnout so many high-achievers know intimately. And what a perfect book to read in community. I’ve been honored to be included in this circle of leaders who first bonded on retreat, and now gather to remind one another, chapter by chapter, that they matter far beyond just what they produce.

NOTE: Please know that nothing I share is a paid endorsement. I just talk about what I’m really captivated by and curious about each month. Hence the randomness. 😊 To that end, please comment or message me if you have any rabbit holes you recommend I disappear down for a bit. I’m always looking for new and interesting things to get absorbed in.

Are you a woman looking for this kind of emotional exploration while working through what you want to create next in your life with a supportive cohort?*

As curriculum director and co-facilitator of The Murmuration Collective Immersives, I’d love to invite you to join our upcoming 6-mo program that kicks off with a 3-day Immersive in Montana:

^{*Our group welcomes all women, including cis and trans women.}

Learn More

All the ways to work with me:

One-on-One Coaching — Book a free info call
ICF Mentor Coaching — Join a cohort or sign up for 1:1
Custom Workshops — Learn more & design yours
Not sure which avenue is right for you? Send me a note.

Hello, Friends.

Growth happens outside our comfort zone. We hear that so often its impact has faded like the worn Scholastic Book Fair posters we probably first saw it printed on. So let me be specific.

My edge this May was a flight to Paris. Alone. Not for a paid engagement, which is how I usually travel for work, but for the International Coaching Federation conference, an optional learning opportunity I wanted to invest in.

Now, I own and operate a business. The immediate impact on my bottom line of such intellectual curiosity is not positive. I also have two kids in middle school, and May is one of the absolute busiest months of my year, both personally and professionally. Still, I was going to leave all the emails and projects, the humans I love, to sit in rooms full of strangers on the other side of the Atlantic.

There’s an airbrushed, soft-focus version of this story where I tell you I went! I glowed! I returned transformed!

And that version is a lie of omission.

Here’s the real one that paints a truer picture of what matters most – both for me, and for the people I coach.

The meal that didn’t come

I have Celiac Disease, so I requested a gluten-free meal in advance amidst all the other pre-trip heavy-lifting that we all do as working adults. When I also remembered to confirm it as I boarded the plane, I was pretty proud of myself...So of course, somewhere over the Atlantic, that beautifully safe, previously arranged, and recently verified gluten free meal was handed to another passenger. Who ate it.

Now that’s not the end of the world (I mean, I was still on a flight to Paris), but I mention the meal because it turned out to be an apt metaphor for the whole undertaking. One you’ve undertaken, too.

Because the hard part was everything the meal represented: the weeks of pre-work it takes to leave a busy life. Briefing the people who’d cover for me. Reminding the kids of their appointments. Getting quality sessions in with all my clients before I left and scheduling them again for immediately upon my return to ensure not too much time passed without our connecting.

That’s the real cost of a growth experience, and it’s the reason so many accomplished people never go. They don’t doubt the value, they’ve just done the math on the financial cost plus the mental-emotional pre-work and re-entry, and the comfort zone is so reasonable by comparison.

So why choose the harder thing on purpose?

The research nobody puts on an inspirational poster

In 1908, psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson ran a study that you’ve probably heard about even if you don’t recognize their names. The Yerkes-Dodson Law1 found that performance rises as stress increases, but only up to a certain point. Too little pressure and we zone out, bored and unmotivated. Too much, and we tip into overwhelm, where learning and execution falter. The optimal point is in the middle: enough discomfort to wake us up, not so much that we freak out.

This is the research that underpins the Learning Zone Model2 you’ve probably seen depicted as three rings reminiscent of a bullseye:

• The Comfort Zone, where everything is predictable and nothing changes in the center

• The Learning Zone, the productive stretch where real development happens in the middle

• The Panic or Alarm Zone, where stress blocks growth entirely on the outside

It’s also what we see stretched along the horizontal used in Adaptive Leadership3 and applied to groups and systems:

• Too little disequilibrium on the bottom layer and the heat (the urgency or friction) is too low. We avoid the work by keeping things cool, comfortable, and polite.

• The productive zone of disequilibrium in the center band is where we ask hard questions and make uncomfortable interpretations for the sake of progress.

• The top layer indicates too much disequilibrium where the heat hits a boiling point, with discomfort too high to be productive. Here, we avoid the work by devolving into actively destructive behaviors or merely shutting down.

I appreciate the honesty in these diagrams. They don’t promise that our stretch will feel good while we’re in it. They only promise that the edge between couch potato and fetal position is where growth lives.

Now, it didn’t feel that way as I was belted into my hangry window seat and thinking of my back-up snacks in the overhead compartment three people away. But I went to Paris because I teach this. And to be in integrity as I coach others toward their edges, I have to confront my own.

What waits on the other side

The financial, logistical, and emotional work was the price. Here’s what it bought.

The boring, irritating gluten constraint, the very thing I’d braced against as a source of isolation in the land where bread is Art, became a cord that others grabbed onto. After I posted offhand about finding gluten free boulangeries, people from the conference sought me out. We compared notes and swapped the names of safe cafés, bonding over the absurdity of explaining “no, really, none” in three languages.

Of course. Dr. Brené Brown, who studies courage and vulnerability, has built a body of research on exactly this reversal: being brave enough to let yourself be seen in the place you’d rather hide sparks connection.4

Then there were sessions that reminded me, in my bones and not just my notes, why I do this work. A walk through the Luxembourg Gardens with a fellow improviser who’s also a CTI-trained coach, two people speaking the same two strange languages of “Yes, And” and deep presence. Meeting my mentor coach’s mentor coach by chance on the first night, a woman I’d hoped to meet and learn from who also happens to have Celiac Disease (of course!). Unhurried conversations about the MCC credential and coaching supervision that could only happen at a table full of coaches meeting face-to-face after having steeped themselves in the nuances of the profession for three days straight. People I’d “met” as small profile pictures on LinkedIn were suddenly three-dimensional because despite my Introvert Rising, I’d posted that I’d love to connect in person, and they met me in that hope.

None of that was available to me in my comfort zone. All of it required the time, effort, and willingness to absorb the cost on both ends.

Versailles, and a harder lesson about leaders

I also joined a post-conference excursion to Versailles. I didn’t really want to go (not only because I’d signed up for a wine tasting in Montmartre that was cancelled and walking around Paris alone is one of my personal definitions of bliss), but also because I didn’t want to gawk at opulence built on others’ shoulders. Nevertheless, I was doing all of this to stretch myself, so I went, and rather than fall into my own bus seat to comfortably zone out, I asked a woman if I could share hers. Minutes into our conversation she shared that she’d signed up for Montmartre and was feeling lackluster about the palace (of course!), and we had wide-ranging, meaningful conversation on the roundtrip journey to what ultimately surprised me.

Because here’s what I noticed seeing Versailles at this point in my life: You can read those gold-soaked halls in two ways. One: magnificence. The other: this is what unhealed fear builds, a monument to a leader’s need to wall out threat and convert anxiety into spectacle.5 What our tour guide called a Propaganda Palace.

The extravagance had me holding two seemingly contradictory truths at once. The first was (unexpected) compassion. So much of the grandiosity we see in leadership, the empire-building, the image management, the can’t-stop-proving, grows from a real and human place of fear and old wounds. Understanding that is not optional for anyone who wants to lead well or coach those who do. The second truth is that understanding the wound does not excuse the harm it later inflicts. Versailles cost people. Leaders who avoid their own discomfort almost always make others pay for it.

The developmental psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, who spent decades at Harvard studying how adults grow, have a name for the machinery underneath all that gilding. They call it our immunity to change: when we fail to alter something we sincerely want to change, it’s usually not because of failure of willpower but of a psychological immune system doing its job, attacking any shift it reads as a threat to our identity.6

What this means for you

You’re probably not flying to Paris this week (though if you are, I’m thrilled for you). Still, you’re standing near an edge of your own: the conversation you keep not having, the role you’re qualified for and afraid of, the boundary you know you need to set. And you’ve already run the same math I did, the immediate mental-emotional-sometimes-financial investment versus the unpromised future pay-off.

The voice in your head that concludes the discomfort isn’t worth it, is your fear talking. But your intellect knows that while the cost of stretching is real, it’s also temporary. Conversely, the cost of never stretching may be initially invisible, but it compounds over time.

So here’s how to make the leap without falling off the edge

• Name the edge out loud. Say the thing you’ve been circling to one trusted person, in a single, plain sentence. Naming it moves it from something that runs you to something you can look at and choose. You’re not committing to the leap yet, only to seeing it clearly.

• Run the stretch-or-panic check. Ask whether you’re experiencing the productive discomfort of the Learning Zone or the genuine overwhelm of the Alarm Zone. They feel almost identical from the inside, but they call for opposite responses. Stretch asks you to lean in. True overwhelm says you need more stable footing first.

• Plan the re-entry before you leave. Most people brace for the trip and get ambushed by the return. If your edge involves time away, block two recovery days on your calendar now, before you go. If it’s internal recalibration you’ll need after a tough conversation or similar stretch close to home, block an hour or an afternoon for coffee by yourself to write out some reflections or to take a walk in the park to reset your nervous system. Remind your people (and yourself) any work on pause is expected, and the time away to stretch and integrate is part of the work.

• Surface one hidden assumption. Borrow from Kegan and Lahey. Finish this sentence: “If I actually did the thing I’m avoiding, the worst thing I fear is ____.” Then ask whether that fear is a fact or a story you’ve never interrogated. Most of our immunities to change live in untested assumptions.

• Bring your limitation to the table. Find one low-stakes place to let yourself be seen in something you’d usually hide. Often, the vulnerability you braced to apologize for is the very thing that connects you to someone else.

Growth does happen outside our comfort zone. And sometimes it has a flight number, a meal that doesn’t come, and both a gluten free croissant and a garden full of new connections on the other side.

Let’s explore,
Katy

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Like you, I’ve had a very full month.

Mine consisted (in part) of facilitating a few multi-day leadership development retreats and coaching many leaders one-on-one. These conversations have reminded me how often high achievers get to a point — usually a decade or so past their twenties — when everything’s objectively going well: The promotion’s been earned. The family’s intact. The résumé’s as impressive as always.

And yet things feel flat.

Do you know that feeling?

I’ve been there — and part of my challenge was that I couldn’t point to a specific cause. I couldn’t clearly articulate what was wrong because there wasn’t anything that was obviously broken or in crisis. In fact, from the outside it looked like I’d arrived at a place I’d worked really hard to get to — I was included in closed-door conversations that influenced decision-making, I was doing excellent work that helped people alongside organizations I respected and that others found prestigious.

But it felt like all the air had been sucked out of most of the rooms I entered.

I spent a lot of time worrying that I was being ungrateful, then wondering if I was burnt out. And then I landed on what Daniel Goleman and countless colleagues have shown: that emotions are information.

The mind-bender is that the gap didn’t appear because we did anything wrong. It appeared because we succeeded in following a course we outgrew or that we were handed before we were self-aware enough to chart our own.

How We Bought Into This Blueprint for Success

Most of us spent our teens and twenties learning to perform against someone else’s rubric.1

We assembled a map from early praise and recognition — the gold stars that Brené Brown writes about, the moments when our worth got attached to our accomplishments before we could distinguish between them.2 It was shaped by industrial educational systems. By family expectations, spoken or not. By organizational cultures that rewarded measurable output and equated visibility with value.

We didn’t choose the criteria, but we memorized them.

And then we absorbed them.

This is supported by NYU, Wharton, and Yale professor Amy Wrzesniewski’s work with Barry Schwartz on intrinsic motivation: when external rewards become the primary measure of value, they can crowd out the internal signal that tells us what matters to us.3

Erik Erikson named this territory ages ago. His seventh stage of psychosocial development occurs from roughly age 40 to 65, and it’s defined by a fundamental shift.4 As they confront the idea of giving back to society through caring for others and being productive during their prime earning years, people stop asking themselves what do I need to achieve? and start asking what do I want to leave behind? They move away from producing more and toward creating more meaning — which can be incredibly destabilizing since it requires knowing what we personally find meaningful.

The Design Opportunity Your Advisor Failed to Mention

We tend to treat discomfort as a problem to solve. But what if the dissonance is pulling us to further development? What if the discomfort comes from growing pains?

There’s a lot of controversy around charting happiness across people’s lifespans — with the old (now disproven) lore stating that well-being dips in midlife, then rises again.5 Yet it poses an interesting question: what if we could force an inflection point? What if our own lower points of relative happiness could be influenced by shifting how we evaluate our lives? If what matters to us changes as we age, which appears to be true, then it would stand to reason that updating our internal calibration every so often (if we’re privileged enough to do so), and realigning our choices and behaviors accordingly would have a positive impact on our well-being.

That idea’s promising; and what research doesn’t tell us — what no dataset can — is what it feels like to be inside that inflection point while it’s happening. To sense that something needs to start shifting but to not yet know where we’re headed.

If that’s where you are:

• What might it mean if your restlessness is actually a sign that your values are asking to be heard?

• What if the flatness you feel is a result of dissonance, exposing the gap between who you’ve been performing and who you’ve become?

• What if arriving at these questions, at this particular moment in your life, is not a warning sign, but an invitation?

What Redefinition Requires

The high-achievers I work with are extraordinarily good at setting and achieving goals. Give them a target, and they’ll pursue it with remarkable efficiency and discipline. That’s precisely why goal-setting alone won’t solve this — because redefinition lies in stepping back from the question, what new thing do I want to achieve next? to instead ask: what’s really important to me now, and how much of my life reflects that?

That kind of excavation takes a different energy than drive. It takes patience and curiosity, learning to tolerate the ambiguity of not yet knowing, which is deeply uncomfortable for people wired for results. I’ve sat with clients who can hold an entire organizational transformation in their minds without flinching, but find it genuinely nerve-wracking to sit with an open question about what they want their life to feel like.

That discomfort is real. And it’s also information.

There’s a particular trap that smart, capable people fall into: performing clarity rather than having it. Deciding quickly, committing publicly, moving on. It looks like leadership and feels like the kind of confidence that got you here. But when the question is about what’s really important to you — about separating what you used to want or were taught to want, from what you actually want now — speed is your enemy. The answer you come to immediately is usually an old script you’ve memorized.

This is where play helps — seriously. Dr. Stuart Brown spent decades studying play in thousands of people and found a strong correlation between playful engagement and adaptive capacity.6 Among many other positive attributes, certain types of play — low-stakes exploration with no fixed outcome — allow humans to safely try on new identities before committing to them. Adults who maintain a playful mindset tend to be more resilient, more creative, and better at navigating exactly the kind of uncertainty that comes with genuine change.

This is unsurprising for anyone who’s worked in improv. When we’re on stage without a script in front of a paying audience, we learn something fundamental: there’s no way we can anticipate what’s coming. The only move is to accept the gift in front of us and build from there. That Yes, And philosophy is exactly what redefining success requires. We accept what’s true about where we are. And then we build.

I remember a specific session with a client — I’ll withhold the details to maintain confidentiality — where we kept circling a question about what she wanted her work to feel like. She’s accomplished, insightful, entirely capable of answering the question. But every answer she gave was about output, contribution, what she could produce for others. It took nearly forty minutes before she said something about what she wanted the work to feel like for her. The shift in her face when she noticed that was like something loose inside her had finally clicked into place.

That moment doesn’t happen on a timeline. You can’t schedule it. You can only create the conditions for it.

The Undiscovered Country Worth Exploring

Success, redefined, is a new orientation toward which goals we want now (not the ones we thought were cool in high school).

It’s a way of moving through choices with more of ourselves present. It doesn’t mean we have to explode our lives or that everything changes. For some people it means one thing changes, and that one thing turns out to matter more than anything else. For others it’s a slower recalibration, a gradual reprioritizing of what deserves their energy and attention.

Either way, what I know is this: the people who do this work — who sit with the discomfort of Not-Yet-Knowing long enough for something true to surface — tend to move with a different quality afterward. In being more successful as they’ve defined it for themselves, they’ve also become more themselves.

And that, I’ve found, is what they were really looking for all along.

Best wishes and happy thoughts,
Katy

1. Paris, The Novel by Edward Rutherford — I’m heading to Paris for the ICF Converge Summit, and my pre-trip reading landed me in Rutherford’s centuries-long portrait of the city—which goes all the way back to 1261 and winds its way to the 20th century through the interconnected stories of a handful of families whose lives keep colliding across generations. At 805 pages it is, to be honest, a lot of book. But at 100+ pages in, what I find most compelling isn’t the grandeur or the spectacle of one of the world’s most famous cities — it’s the way Rutherford shows how a city shapes the people who live inside it just as much as they shape the city. That reciprocal relationship between place and person feels relevant to something I think about often in coaching: how much our environment (our organizational culture, our community, our geography) can gradually shape us, and how rarely some of us consciously examine that. Arriving in a famous city for a convening of professional coaches with that idea in my back pocket feels like a good way to begin.

2. Coach Educator Competencies Thanks to the ICF Converge Preconference Session — I’m also attending a preconference session on Defining Excellence in Coaching Education at Converge Summit, which sent me down a genuinely absorbing rabbit hole on the ICF’s Coach Educator Competencies—the framework that defines what it means to teach coaching well, not just practice it. The depth of thought behind these standards is the kind of thing that either bores you to tears or fills you with professional admiration, and I’ll confess to being firmly (and nerdily) in the second camp. What strikes me is the way they hold together two things that can feel at odds: rigor and relational presence. You can have a beautifully precise framework and a commitment to extemporaneous co-creation and curiosity. That’s part of what gives executive coaching its power and is the leadership edge we all consistently work as coaches. Watch this space for more as I fully geek out on how we can best teach that.

3. Wiser Than Me Podcast by Julia Louis-Dreyfus — This one just happily resurfaced for me, months after I first listened to it, thanks to someone in one of this month’s leadership development retreats who recommended it to her cohort. This second encounter is a welcome reminder for me who loves podcasts but somehow always forget to turn to them. Louis-Dreyfus interviews women who are typically in their seventies — Fran Lebowitz, Debbie Allen, Jane Fonda, Isabel Allende, among others — and asks them, essentially, what they know now. It’s funny and warm and often surprising, and sometimes functions as an extended meditation on many of the questions I find so generative in coaching: What do you actually want your life to look like? How have you become who you are? What do you appreciate about your Former Self and what would you tell her if you could sit down for coffee? Plus, there’s the slightly radical counter-culture notion of celebrating the wisdom that comes with age — and especially celebrating that in women. Highly recommend to upgrade tired crone culture scripts for a more Honor the Knowing Enchantress Within vibe.

NOTE: Please know that nothing I share is a paid endorsement. I just talk about what I’m really captivated by and curious about each month. Hence the randomness. 😊 To that end, please comment or message me if you have any rabbit holes you recommend I disappear down for a bit. I’m always looking for new and interesting things to get absorbed in.

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Hello, friends.

As an English Major, I’ve always read with a pen in my hand, underlining passages I want to remember, putting notes and symbols in the margins. And while I’d read excerpts of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning over the years, I’d never read the book itself in its entirety until this month.

I needed two pens.

Of course I did. If we’ve heard anything about the book, it’s that it’s profoundly powerful. It has multiple parts: an account of Frankl’s time in four different concentration camps during WWII, an explanation of his therapeutic doctrine, logotherapy; as well as a postscript on the case for tragic optimism, and an afterward from William J. Winslade on the impact of Frankl’s life and work1. It’s on countless people’s lists of books that changed their lives, and one particularly worth turning to if you’re looking for more meaning in yours.2

So my reflection here isn’t in any way intended to replace reading the book3; rather, it’s meant as a chance to explore why I can’t stop thinking about it and how its advice for life may benefit us all now. Because there are so many existential parallels that I talk about with coaching clients currently — despite the span of years, despite the technological advances, despite the severity of Frankl’s situation and the intersecting surrealities of our own. And despite the distinct and vital difference between therapy and coaching, logotherapy offers us some reminders of our own responsibility, and as a result, our own degree of choice and autonomy.

We know this intellectually, and still, if we’re cursing a blue streak as we fight with the lid of our travel coffee mug for the umpteen-millionth time while our laptops insist on running updates the moment we try to connect to a Monday morning Zoom meeting, it can be a valuable reminder.

Even the legitimate strain that comes from very real pressures like managing increasing work and responsibility while caring for ailing family members can cause us to question ourselves and our lives. How many of us when up against a challenging moment have asked, “What’s wrong with me?” or “Why is this so hard?” And it doesn’t take long for a memory gap or a failure in our organizational systems to lead us to wonder if we have undiagnosed ADHD or another physical or neurotic concern.

My reading of Frankl is that logotherapy provides a reassuring, resonant perspective that not only is some amount of conflict normal and healthy, but that it’s also an opportunity to live beyond ourselves. That the point is not to rush through conflict to get to the meaning of our lives, but to meet it in a way that gives our lives meaning.

Frankl isn’t peddling toxic optimism; in fact, he famously speaks of the optimists who gave up in the concentration camps when the failed realization of their optimistic hopes disappointed them so harshly as to break their spirits entirely. His is an earned optimism that doesn’t deny the challenges, or even atrocities one might face, and yet asserts that meaning can still be found in those extreme cases.

He’s quick to clarify that if suffering can be eliminated it should be, as to suffer unnecessarily is masochism. But in instances where suffering is inevitable — be it small “s” suffering or large “S” Suffering — we still have control over how we choose to bear it. And in choosing how and who we want to be in those moments, we give that suffering and our lives meaning. As he writes, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves” (112).

Of course, I’m sure we’d all prefer to find meaning through logotherapy’s other avenues — by “creating a work or doing a deed” or by “experiencing something or encountering someone” (111). But I find it heartening that unavoidable suffering can also provide meaning. Because who and how we choose to be matters.

We can choose to show up and behave in ways that make us proud even — perhaps especially — in moments of unavoidable hardship. And in so doing, at some future point we can reflect upon those moments in our lives as profoundly significant. Remembering this as we enter times of struggle, or slog through the seemingly endless middle of them, can give us a tether to that future vision, which can thereby inspire us to meet our current suffering as our best selves now.

It can be daunting to think that we alone must be fully responsible for our own decisions and lives. And yet, as Frankl goes on, I find his view ultimately reassuring, as it rests on the idea that none of us is expected to know our purpose innately or independently. Rather, he writes that “the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system” (110).

My layman’s reading of this is that we’re meant to bumble around a little bit as we experiment and explore and find our way to what fulfills us, because by definition what has meaning will be found in our interacting with the world. So not only is there nothing wrong with those of us who didn’t know what we were meant to do with our lives at the age of six — or who chased something until the age of 45 only to discover reaching it wasn’t as fulfilling as we’d imagined — but this confusion and struggle and pushing back the void by scratching and beginning again, time after countless time, is a large part of the point.

And lest you think this is incredibly egomaniacal and self-serving, Frankl stresses that, “The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself…in other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence” (110-111).

So, self-actualization cannot — according to Frankl’s logotherapy — occur within an individual but must happen through interaction with the world around us, whether via work to be done, someone or something to be encountered, or unavoidable suffering to be endured. Thus, it makes sense that the meaning of life “always changes but…never ceases to be” because the meaning is found in the living of it (111).

So the meaning of one phase of life might be found in training for a particular career while the meaning of another phase is found in applying those skills to help others, followed by a phase whose meaning comes from being between jobs and searching for a new one, followed by a phase that is meaningful for helping a loved one age and die well, or by living that path ourselves.

How much more realistic and simultaneously reassuring is this, than thinking there is one sole purpose for the entirety of each of our lives that we must discover or forever live in lack of, victims of perpetual and aimless dissatisfaction? That if the meaning we once found in something has matured, we should cling to it even as it has started to decay, rather than release it with gratitude and open ourselves to the next phase of our lives and the meaning we can make there?

This is not to say that any of this is easy, just that it’s possible. And we succeed in the doing. For as Frankl writes, “Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives into conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment” (131).

So our charge is simultaneously formidable and emboldening: What will we choose to become in this moment?

Onward for us all,
Katy

1. ICF PCC Marker Assessor Training — I’ve been down a major rabbit hole on the International Coaching Federation PCC Markers and those trained to use them to evaluate coach performance, and honestly, it has left me with fresh respect for the profession. The standards themselves are detailed and demanding, but what struck me most was the care underneath them: a real attempt to make assessment fair, consistent, replicable, and anchored in what quality coaching actually looks and sounds like. ICF describes the markers as indicators of a coach’s mastery of the Core Competencies, and emphasizes that trained assessors use them to support reliable and consistent evaluations. That kind of painstaking rigor could be easy to grumble about, but it’s also part of what protects the credibility of the coaching profession, the power of coaching, and both the value and impact of coaching for clients.

2. All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker — This one is beautiful and bruising in the way only certain novels are: the sort that manages to be heartbreaking without becoming bleak. Penguin Random House describes it as at once a missing person mystery, serial killer thriller, and a love story; Orion calls it “an epic love story, a soaring thriller, and a sweeping coming-of-age tale,” which, for once, doesn’t feel like jacket-copy hyperbole when you get to the actual pages. I would add that it’s also a study in devotion, damage, and the long echoes of what happens to us when we’re young. If you like fiction that’s emotionally expansive, narratively propulsive, and just a little dangerous to read before bed because suddenly it is 1:14 am, then this is your book.

3. The City of San Francisco — Thanks to the forcing mechanism of my children’s spring break and the generosity of friends who hosted us, I’ve been newly charmed by San Francisco through the eyes of kids, which may be one of the best ways to experience a place. Golden Gate Park really is as enormous and varied as people say, stretching across 1,017 acres; the Bridge is still striking in its dramatic marriage of function and form; and Ghirardelli Square remains a joyful landmark with both sugar-high appeal and real architectural history as the first successful adaptive reuse project in the country. There’s something deeply encouraging about watching kids delight in a city’s scale, fog, snacks, and landscape. Also, research continues to suggest that green space is good for children’s physical and mental well-being, and that awe in nature can meaningfully support well-being for the rest of us too, which feels like a nice scientific endorsement of what our minds and bodies already know when we’re standing in a park or looking out at a bay, ocean, mountain range or prairie.

4. Becoming a Cyclist (For Real This Time) — I live in Colorado, where people appear to regard a bicycle less as a hobby than as a moral commitment. Snow on the ground? Bike. Twenty degrees? Bike. Headwind? Apparently, still bike. I continue to be fascinated by this phenomenon. And yet I get the appeal intellectually: cycling is exercise, transportation, landscape, humility, and independence all in one package. The evidence is annoyingly supportive. The World Health Organization (along with approximately a million and twelve other health orgs) note that regular physical activity, including cycling, improves health and well-being, and that any amount counts. Research on physical-activity habits also keeps pointing to the same unappealing truth: consistency matters, habits strengthen behavior over time, and implementation intentions or specific action plans help close the gap between wanting to exercise and actually doing it. For longer or multi-day rides (which is what’s recently captured the spirit of my imagination if not yet my quads), the evidence-based training principles are similarly unglamorous and similarly persuasive: build gradually, keep most training at lower intensity, and respect progression and recovery rather than trying to hero our way into endurance. So…I guess there’s nothing to it but to do it, and I’ll be getting back on the bike (again and again) this month.

5. How to Get to Heaven from Belfast — If you have ever encountered the phrase “to curse like the Irish,” you’ll appreciate that this show brings with it an especially vivid, uh, regional specialization. Lisa McGee’s Netflix series is an eight-episode comedy-thriller about old friends, buried secrets, and the sort of loyalty that gets more complicated with age rather than less. Official Netflix materials frame it as the story of three women pulled back together by a school friend’s wake and a secret they would very much prefer stayed buried. The Guardian highlights its poetic homage to decades-long friendship, the power of place, as well as the creative brilliance of Columbo and Scooby Doo, and critics have praised its wit, tonal daring, and emotional charge. I would call it dark, profane, funny, and oddly tender underneath a pulsing dance club beat of chaos. There’s heavier material in it, yes, but the friendship is the point. And speaking of, I found it through my own friend’s recommendation as “a pocket of joy,” which is not the phrase one usually uses for a murder mystery, and yet here we are, and she wasn’t wrong.

NOTE: Please know that nothing I share is a paid endorsement. I just talk about what I’m really captivated by and curious about each month. Hence the randomness. 😊 To that end, please comment or message me if you have any rabbit holes you recommend I disappear down for a bit. I’m always looking for new and interesting things to get absorbed in.

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The Aligned Impact Institute™ — Join the next cohort
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Not sure which avenue is right for you? Send me a note.

Hello, friends.

So…I lost my cool the other day.

I was sitting at my kitchen table and had just asked a healthcare provider what I thought was a simple question: could a friend or family member sign for my son’s upcoming appointment, or could I reschedule for another day since I’d been called in for jury duty?

Well, she said, X could be possible, or else there’s also Y. Or, you know, Z. Then she repeated that noncommittal series of possibilities three times. This circuitous conversation style had surfaced each time I spoke with someone in her specialty, which I’d been doing for months. I tried to rephrase my question, and she interrupted me to loop through her response which wasn’t an answer once more. I got so frustrated at her not listening to me that I stopped listening. I parried her interruptions with my own, and insulted by her tone, I matched it in kind.

The whole interaction was less than five minutes long. But I ended up carrying it all day.

Does that sound familiar?

A sharper tone, a convenient half-truth, some thinly veiled avoidance or pushing, maybe even insinuating that someone else is at fault more than they probably are. Something we think back on once we’ve regulated our nervous system with the belief, “That’s not who I am.”

And yet it still happened.

The good news is that it happens to all of us, and we can all show up better when we adjust and repair.

I think of it as drifting out of personal alignment like a car hydroplaning on wet roads. It’s not a hard, abrupt choice to betray ourselves all at once. It’s not one intentional decision; rather, it’s the result of a series of tiny circumstantial slips. Slips that are more likely when we’re worried about a loved one, stressed, or crunched for time. When circumstances are ambiguous, we’re moving too fast, or the stakes feel high.

In other words, often.

Here’s my bookish armchair scientist’s theory as to why this happens:

· Pressure physically narrows our field of vision. Like the proverbial deer caught in headlights or twitchy rabbit that darts its head around under threat, our vision narrows under stress so we can literally only see what’s right in front of us. Under time scarcity or tension, our attention collapses around what we feel we urgently need right now, often at the expense of important considerations like who and how we’d like to be. In other words, when demands are high and schedules are tight, we stop seeing options and start searching for exits.¹

· Threat throws us into automatic pilot, and our brains react the same way to social threats as they do to basic survival needs.2 If you’ve ever panicked because you realized you were late to a Zoom meeting or stewed over being excluded from an important conversation at work, you know the physiology of feeling like we’re being chased by a sabretooth tiger when in reality we’re only facing a mildly embarrassing apology or a courageous conversation. To paraphrase a former CIA agent: Leaders don’t rise to the occasion, they fall to the level of their training. Because training requires practice, and when we’re under threat – whether as an individual or part of a group – we often restrict information processing, increase our attempts at control, and revert to practiced thinking and behavior, something researchers call threat-rigidity. Which is to say that when we feel we’re under attack – physically, emotionally, or socially – our most entrenched habits can easily override our best intentions.3 4

· Humans are wired to think in narrative, and when we feel out of alignment with our values due to our own actions, the story we make up is often more rationalization than reality. Under strain, people justify small, even repeated, slips. We try to minimize our own discomfort by shifting responsibility, minimizing our negative impact on others, or reframing ourselves and our actions in a more positive light.5 We don’t outright deny the dissonance between what we say we value and our actions, we just focus so much on other factors – like urgency, status, ambition, or our desire to win, or to please or protect others – that any misalignment with our personal values or even truly unethical behavior fades into the back of our minds.6 Basically, we make up stories to justify why it was ok that we gave in to our amygdala hijack, which is an incredibly fast and intense emotional response to a perceived threat that’s totally out of proportion to the actual situation.

We know this from our own experience.

As a result, I first strayed from my value of listening, then I abandoned my Yes-And mindset, and then I departed from calm and connected communication to arrive at interrupting and defensiveness.

There’s a reason this entirely human slippery slope is reflected in some of our most enduring literature. Works like Macbeth, Lord of The Flies, 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale (to name just a few) examine what happens when individuals and groups continuously justify a cascade of small slips when consumed by fear and ambition so that – when left unchecked – community values collapse into oppression and murder.

Thankfully, we can stop ourselves before we slide right into the death, dying, and destruction of an Orwellian future or a Shakespearean tragedy. And if we get really good, we can do it in less than 2 minutes.

A 90-Second Practice to Realign

1. Stop.
If you’re able, place your feet intentionally, flat on the floor, one after the other.

2. Inhale for a count of 4 and exhale for a count of 6.
Do that at least twice more.

3. Name the pressure.
What’s the threat my system thinks is here?
(EX: status, belonging, time, competence, money, etc.)

4. Name the value.
If I were at my best right now, what value would I be embodying?
How do I want to show up?
(EX: collaborative, playful, honest, generous, compassionate, etc.)

5. Choose the next, small, aligned action.
If I were fully being the way I just identified, what would I do?
What choice, action, or behavior is possible from that way of being?
(EX: one acknowledgment, one joke to remind us not to take ourselves so seriously, one boundary, one empathetic question, one truthful clarification)

Doing those 5 things can start a virtuous cycle for ourselves to get back in integrity with our values and move forward in alignment. What we’ll notice is less blaming, justifying, hiding, and minimizing. And more slowing, clarifying, owning, requesting, and repairing.

An instructor in a mindfulness course I took years ago said, “We don’t strengthen our practice by not letting our minds wander. Like bicep curls, we strengthen our mindfulness by bringing our attention back each time that it wanders.”

Behaving the way we hope to – especially when tensions and emotions run high – is analogous to that.

We get better each time we move past unproductive self-judgment. We take responsibility and repair. We adapt and realign.

So, I swallowed my pride and wrote the healthcare provider an email, apologizing and taking responsibility for my part of the mess. I don’t know if it will improve our relationship, but it won’t hurt, it got me an answer to my question (!), and it’s already helped me. Because at the end of the day, I know I did my best to repair, to be responsible, cooperative, and grateful. And that’s a win that I can build on.

Drift happens.

But when it does, our values haven’t disappeared. They’ve just been crowded out by stress, urgency, or fear. Once we make a little space, they come back. And we can move forward with humility, clarity, and renewed commitment.

Onward for us all,
Katy

1. Living and Dying Well — When I was getting my MFA in Creative Writing, I discovered author and mortician (yes you read that right) Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity while doing research for a short story I was writing. Part travelogue, part cultural anthropology, the book follows death rituals around the world and reminds us we don’t have to outsource our relationship with mortality to fluorescent-lit institutions. Now I’m reading On Being Mortal by surgeon Atul Gawande, which explores medicine’s limits and posits that perhaps more often our goal should not be to blindly prolong life, but to ensure a good life all the way to the end, shaped by autonomy, dignity, and what matters most to the person living it. This has me thinking again of Doughty’s work and of Joan Halifax’s Being with Dying that offered a coaching client from a decade ago meditations and hard-won wisdom on cultivating compassion and fearlessness in the presence of death that helped her stay connected to each of her parents as they grew ill and passed away.

2. GF Bread Baking — Having had success making madeleines and hamburger buns from scratch thanks to my America’s Test Kitchen “How Can It Be Gluten Free? Cookbook, I incentivized myself to get our tax documents together with promise of a $10 baguette pan. Then I discovered this lucky tutorial from King Arthur Flour on YouTube. And now my family and I are happily ready to carbo-load through the rest of this mild Colorado winter.

3. Perfection — I met a woman at an In-N-Out Burger as I dropped off my kids for her son’s birthday party. She was carrying a tote bag that said, “Ask me what I’m reading,” and thankfully I did. That’s how I discovered Vincenzo Latronico’s smart, slim novel that takes place in Berlin, was translated from Italian, and is one of six works that were shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It’s simultaneously sharp and strangely tender about the way aesthetics can become a substitute for aliveness, and it left me nostalgic for the nineties in a way only one who lived through the rise of the internet can be. I found myself wanting to both declutter my home and also call my friends to ask, “What are we all doing? Are we okay?”

4. Nigella Lawson coming to Bake-Off — Happily, after just a couple days’ mourning Prue Leith announcing her retirement from The Great British Bake Off, my phone blew up with friends telling me Nigella Lawson had been tapped as her replacement. Since then, seeing how Dame Prue has so warmly endorsed the new judge, praised her coworkers on the show, and helped increase “cookery” lessons for children has been a cozy reinforcement of everything I hope to be true about the proverbial and amiable Tent.

5. Turning Old Shirts Into Quilts — Perhaps because I’ve been reading Perfection and thinking about death, I’ve been especially taken with the idea of trading in the large box of keepsake fabrics taking up space in the back of my closet (that included t-shirts from college, as well as – embarrassingly – my Honors sash from high school and my MFA hood) for a practical-sentimental-craftsy solution. Now thanks to Campus Quilt, instead of seeing these things each time I’m rummaging around for a sweater and thinking, “I should really get rid of this. What does any nonacademic do with a hood anyway?” I can wrap a sheath of nostalgia around my shoulders to watch Bake-Off on a hard day.

   NOTE: Please know that nothing I share is a paid endorsement. I just talk about what I’m really captivated by and curious about each month. Hence the randomness. 😊 To that end, please comment or message me if you have any rabbit holes you recommend I disappear down for a bit. I’m always looking for new and interesting things to get absorbed in.

Enthusiastically welcoming women to join our upcoming 6-mo program that kicks off with a 5-day Immersive in Spain this spring:

Learn More and Join the Cohort

All the ways to work with me:

The Aligned Impact Institute™ — Explore further
One-on-One Coaching — Book a free info call
ICF Mentor Coaching — Join a cohort or sign up for 1:1
Custom Workshops — Learn more & design yours
Not sure which avenue is right for you? Send me a note.

Hello friends,

Many of you know that one of the things I love most about coaching and facilitating conversations about leadership and growth is that it helps me keep my promises to myself.

To be in integrity, I have to practice what I teach: direct and kind conversations, boundaries, results…and, making time to reflect, restore, and shake up my routine.

So, a few hours after facilitating a leadership workshop in Las Vegas, I found myself doing something exquisitely lighthearted: eating dinner on the patio of a French bistro, listening to a street performer sing mariachi.

Only in Vegas would that make any sense.

And only in Vegas could the same day include a conference ballroom filled with managers from all over the world, a gold-painted human statue whose stillness was somehow more magnetic than The Strip… and, later, a tornado that rumbled through my ribcage inside The Sphere.

I still don’t think Vegas is my city;1 but still I found myself surprised and delighted anyway.

The workshop lesson I didn’t expect to (re)learn in public with spandex and feathers

One section of my workshop that day centered on an idea many of us know and still ignore: sometimes the most productive thing we can do for growth is to take a step back.

Replenish. Restore. Let our nervous systems unclench long enough to integrate what we’re learning.

It’s hard for all of us—even those of us who teach it from stages, dressed professionally, with the kind of confidence that says, “I totally drink enough water and take a lunch break every day.”

So there I was, watching a crowd gather around that gold-body-suited, face-painted performer. He stayed perfectly stationary as the neon, befeathered chaos of The Strip swirled around him…and his stillness was riveting.

A shiny reminder that though we might think pausing stunts our power, it amplifies it.

Enter: The Sphere

Thus charmed with this auspicious golden symbol of my endeavor’s merit, I went to The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere with very little idea of what to expect.

Later I learned that to adapt the 1939 film to play on a wraparound dome surrounding spectators, the creators used AI to “intelligently enhance the film’s resolution, extend backgrounds, and digitally recreate characters who would otherwise not appear [together] on the same screen.”2

But if we stop at it’s done by AI, we miss the heart of it.

It took two years and more than 2,000 people all told (including creatives, engineers, researchers, executives, and craftspeople working across various organizations) to bring the film I first watched on the 10-inch screen of the one boxy television in my childhood home to life inside a ginormous environment that’s as long as three football fields and extends 22 stories high.3 4 5

Because the Sphere isn’t just a big screen. It’s a full-body immersion. And as someone specializing in experiential education, I’m interested in what this kind of project reveals about learning when technical ambition meets innate human drives.

What made it magical for me (and why my body noticed before my brain did)

I went in expecting spectacle, but got something closer to wonder because my nervous system was already responding before my mind could narrate what I was experiencing.

The best parts for me (without giving too much away) were:

• Clouds floating above my head and blue skies that turned to storms so convincingly my shoulders and the skin on the back of my neck raised involuntarily.

• The immensity of the scale that made tiny things matter: butterflies in Munchkinland, bats in the witch’s forest. Small movements were made momentous because the canvas was enormous, and when multiple senses align around the same story, the body believes it.8

• Interactive additions (I don’t want to spoil by naming) that bridged the massive screen and the seats we were in, filling the space above and below us. I flinched at sudden heat and impact. I felt vibration and wind and that unmistakable feeling that something is coming that courses through our muscles before it arrives in language.9

• And yes: the gleefully magical moment when Dorothy was confronted by some disgruntled apple trees… and an audience of hundreds turned into a bunch of six-year-olds at a parade. Hands up, faces open, believing for a minute that the world might still toss us something bright.

Some of that delight was the visible craft of practical engineering. And again: none of this is just AI. It’s multi-sensory design, leveraging a deep understanding of what it means to be human, that’s born of teamwork, experimentation, and discernment. It’s thousands of people dreaming, deciding, collaborating, iterating, arguing, revising, and recalibrating.

And that’s the real magic that led to the transformative personal and collective viewing experience.

Tissue paper, social norms, and the courage to stay enchanted

After the tornado, paper leaves drifted down from the ceiling as the wind died down.

The man next to me, who was maybe in his 50s, tried to catch a leaf, but it drifted down a couple seats away. Then he reached again as another landed on my knee… and stopped just short of touching me.

It was like he was wrenched back into adult social norms: Don’t invade space. Don’t be weird. Don’t be too delighted.

But I was so in it that I lifted the ridiculous leaf off my knee like it was sacred. Held it up to the light like I’d never seen tissue paper before.

Then I turned and offered it to the man wordlessly.

And his whole face lit up. He accepted it with the kind of unadulterated glee that feels ancient, innate, captivatingly childlike.

And I thought: This. This is what it’s all about.

And when we can access that part of ourselves, we tend to surprise ourselves with what we can do and who we can become.

The moments that cracked me open had little to do with CGI

Behind me, a group in their mid-60s sang every word unapologetically.

I admit, at first I was irritated (by the singing and the 20-something on my left filming everything, with his illuminated screen and their voices pulling me out of my suspended disbelief).

But then, one of the women behind me gasped when the Lullaby League appeared and said with pure reverence: “Oh! This is my favorite part!”

It was so…pure…that it stopped the petty complaining in my mind.

There was none of the irony or self-protection I so often hear from adults of all ages in her voice. Just awe.

And it was contagious.

I started feeling affectionate toward the young person filming. Of course he wanted to capture this 90-year-old story reimagined. Of course he wanted to share it with friends or followers on the newest platform I haven’t even heard of yet. How wonderful. The creators of the original could never have imagined it would so profoundly affect new generations in 2026.

And as I looked around, I noticed the enchantment wasn’t just visible, it was palpable. No algorithm or code can fake that.

And then this: A couple from Oregon offered to take my photo in the lobby. We geeked out about the experience like old friends. Then they said if I’m ever in their small coastal town, I should go to a particular market and I’ll get a free burrito if I drop their names.

This is the gift of shared immersion. It collapses the distance between strangers because we’re not just seated near each other. We’re in it together.

And that’s what sticks, in both life and work.

What all of this has to do with learning and leadership

There’s a version of growth that’s basically moralized exhaustion: Push harder. Do more. Download the next framework. Keep up.

Because growth isn’t only built through discipline. It’s also built through vitality. And vitality is infectious.

The Sphere can do extraordinary things with AI, but what made the night unforgettable was the people singing behind me.

The stranger delighted by a tissue-paper leaf.

The Oregon burrito promise.

And if we’re talking about real leadership, the kind that helps people learn, adapt, and grow, then that’s the part worth chasing: The magic of human connection.

I wish you each some shared wonder of your own this month.

Best wishes and happy thoughts,

Katy

Are you a woman looking for this kind of shared emotional journey while working through what you want to create next in your life?

As curriculum director and co-facilitator of The Murmuration Collective Immersives, I’d love to invite you to join our upcoming 6-mo program that kicks off with a 5-day Immersive in Spain:

1. Everything is Tuberculosis—People have been recommending this book to me since it came out, and I’m finally reading the “scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world” that author John Green weaves through recounting the story of a young patient he met when visiting a government hospital in Sierra Leone. It’s a credit to Green that he writes so clearly, effectively, and compellingly about “the history and persistence of our deadliest infection” in just under 200 pages—and that I read it before sleep as a palate-cleanser after listening to the next book on my list.

2. She Said—I’ve been a sucker for high stakes newspaper drama since I was working my way up to being the co-editor-in-chief of my high school paper with my dear friend. The two of us watched All The President’s Men on cable at a sleepover in middle school, then saw The Paper as soon as it came out during our junior year. And this obsession continued as I later devoured the 2005 remake of Good Night, and Good Luck; then Spotlight; and The Post. Perhaps because of that, and the horror of the subject matter, I’m riveted as I listen to this bestseller by the Pulitzer Prize-Winning investigative journalists who helped bring down Harvey Weinstein.

3. Talk to Your Boys—I’m a big believer in intentional conversations, and with the complexity of the world I find myself raising two boys in, I’ll take all the help I can get. Thankfully I have a tremendous partner in parenting in @therealdancraig, and authors Joanna Schroeder and Christopher Pepper have written a guide to forge authentic connection through “16 Conversations to Help Tweens and Teens Grow into Confident, Caring Young Men.”

4. Books to Screens—It started with Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, which we listened to on one of our road trips to South Dakota, and is finally coming out as a film starring Ryan Gosling in March. Then I heard all the buzz about the new Valentine’s Day take on one of my high school favorites, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (who died of TB, incidentally. See note #1). And then Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery came to Netflix and it was Game. On. For a great year of entertainment (fingers crossed).

5. Sous Vide Desserts—Because who doesn’t need crème brûlées and chocolate pots de crème a dozen at a time?

All the ways to work with me:

The Aligned Impact Institute™ — Let me know if you'd like to hear more
One-on-One Coaching — Book a free info call
ICF Mentor Coaching — Join a cohort or sign up for 1:1
Custom Workshops — Learn more & design yours
Not sure which avenue is right for you? Send me a note.

Hello, friends.

Happy New Year, this time of what can feel like arbitrary or artificial resolutions.

And yet, if we want it to, January can evoke sincerity.

The year is new enough that we can hear ourselves think a little more clearly than in December. Life feels slightly more spacious, the pace a little slower. And for many of us who lead with care, this is a moment when we can recommit to doing better by the people and causes we love.

Or perhaps Being better—more present, more patient, more generous.

For high achievers working to improve our teams, organizations, and communities, empathy is often one of the qualities that we value most. It’s what made us good listeners long before we were leaders. It’s what helped us read rooms, anticipate needs, and meet tension with grace. It’s what allowed us to build trust in systems where confidence and security were often missing.

I saw this clearly one evening not long ago, standing in my kitchen at the end of a long day of working and parenting, elbow-deep in chickpea flatbreads I was making in advance of a family celebration. Nothing dramatic had happened. The flatbreads were actually good, and my ambitious culinary goals hadn’t resulted in any kitchen catastrophes (which isn’t always the case). There was just this low hum of exhaustion I could feel in my bones as I replayed a community conversation I’d had earlier—what I should have said, what I didn’t say, how I might make it easier for everyone next time.

And then it hit me: I was working harder in my head to manage other people’s experiences than I was to consider my own. Again.

That realization was clarifying. I wasn’t wrong to empathize, I just needed to recommit to leveraging my empathy while also holding healthy boundaries.

Because the thing is, many of us were taught—explicitly or implicitly—that empathy means absorbing the emotions or work of others, especially in conflict. We learned or intuited that if something feels tense, the most compassionate thing to do is smooth it over, wait, or quietly pick up the slack.

But empathy, practiced this way, becomes a slow leak that drains our clarity, energy, and courage.

That distinction matters.

When we treat empathy as an innate quality—something we either have or don’t—we miss the opportunity to practice it with skill (and also excuse others when they don’t practice it at all). However, when we treat empathy as a capacity, we begin to see it as something that can be strengthened, refined, and regulated in all of us.

Research supports this view. Contemporary psychology and neuroscience describe empathy as a combination of cognitive perspective-taking and emotional attunement—both of which can be cultivated. Dr. Brené Brown has famously distinguished empathy from sympathy, noting that empathy requires presence and connection, not fixing or rescuing.¹ The American Psychological Association goes further, pointing out that unregulated empathy—particularly in high-responsibility roles—can lead to empathic distress and burnout.2 And Chris Voss has explored the flip side, writing and speaking about tactical empathy, a negotiation skill completely separate from care or agreement.3

My hope (I wish it went without saying) is that we can both cultivate an expectation of more empathy for the common good in ourselves, our leaders, and our organizations, and also recognize that empathy without boundaries is not sustainable leadership.

Empathy is not a mere soft skill or a weakness. And it’s also not inextricable from burnout and personal distress.

This perspective is especially present in nonprofit and philanthropic systems, where the work carries moral weight and the needs are real. When the mission matters deeply, it can feel irresponsible to pull back, to pause, or to name limits. Yet the very complexity of these systems demands leaders who can hold multiple truths at once—care deeply, and still make hard calls.

When our work is important, it’s all the more critical to reject the fallacy that if we’re not depleted, we’re not committed. That leadership should feel heavy. That our distress is proof of our dedication.

The truth is, self-sacrifice is not the same as service. Depletion is not a leadership strategy. And confusing burnout with making a difference leads us both to engage in damaging behaviors and to model them for others.

Empathetic leadership, when practiced skillfully, includes ourselves as being just as important as others (not more, but also not less). It requires us to admit that leaders who are chronically overextended are less able to see systems clearly or respond creatively, and they hurt others by conflating exhaustion with prestige.

Many of us delay necessary conversations out of an abundance of care. We wait for the right moment. We protect others from discomfort and tell ourselves we’re being kind. But what we’re really showing them is either that we doubt they’re strong enough to handle whatever it is we’re avoiding, or that we ourselves are not courageous enough to name it.

Or both.

There is a vast difference between caring for someone and taking care of them, between respecting them and keeping them small.

Research on trust and team effectiveness consistently shows that clarity builds trust and innovation (while also reducing errors) more reliably than avoidance.4 Adaptive leadership emphasizes that making progress on our toughest challenges requires a certain amount of productive tension.5 When we withhold clarity in the name of empathy we’re actually being condescending, and people can tell.6 As a result, we do more harm—not less.

Empathy doesn’t ask us to avoid discomfort. It asks us to stay present and connected within it.

Practiced well, empathy allows us to say things like:

• I can see how hard this is—and we still need to address it.

• I care about you—and this boundary matters.

• I understand why this feels uncomfortable—and I know we can move forward together.

This is grounded empathy. Empathy that doesn’t collapse into rescue or martyrdom but that supports both people and purpose.

Studies in neuroscience suggest that leaders who can both remain emotionally regulated and engage empathically with others’ perspectives are better able to maintain their capacity for judgment, flexibility, and restraint—making sound leadership decisions more likely under pressure.7 Emotional Intelligence research echoes this: awareness without overwhelm is what allows leaders to pause, interpret emotional data accurately, and choose deliberate responses rather than to simply and unconsciously react.8

As empathetic high achievers, many of us are exquisitely good at sensing what others need. The growth edge is learning to pair that sensitivity with self-regard, discernment, and discipline.

So as we step into a new year, perhaps the invitation isn’t to be more empathetic—but to be more intentional in how we practice empathy.

To notice where empathy has

• become self-abandonment

• been an excuse for us to avoid or delay necessary clarity

• could be steadier, braver, and more inclusive of ourselves

Empathy is not soft, it’s stabilizing. It’s what allows leaders to stay grounded in complexity without becoming bitter or burned out. It’s what allows us to be both direct and honest, as well as kind and respectful.

What might we gain this year if we practiced empathy not as an unbridled reflex, but as a capacity we are continually and intentionally refining?

I know how hard that is—and I know we can do it. ;)

Best wishes and happy thoughts,
Katy

1. Spiralizing vegetables—I’ve long used the strategy of gamifying to make developing a good habit more palatable for myself. Currently, that looks like spiralizing the heck out of every vegetable I can find to make healthy recipes look like a plate of confetti and streamers. I’m grateful to my mother for this awesome mixer attachment to make it possible at quicker speeds than my old knuckle-grating hand spiralizer, and to Ali Maffucci for writing the cookbook Inspiralized, which is helping me become just that this month.

2. Hello, Beautiful—I’m just about halfway through this absorbing novel by Ann Napolitano that includes great sentences like this one: “She was no longer who she used to be, and she wasn’t yet whoever she was becoming.” Hello, Beautiful centers on a college basketball player born into a house stricken by tragedy and the four close-knit Padavano sisters, exploring themes of trauma, loyalty, the fallacy of planning or controlling our lives, and the strength and limits of the power of love.

3. 90 Minutes of Indisputable Joy—When my sister asked me if I’d be interested in catching The Choir of Man with her at The Denver Center for the Performing Arts, she read me the delightful description that included the phrase “90 minutes of indisputable joy”—for all ages, no less! Who doesn’t want that? So now I’m eagerly awaiting the show next week and looking for more minutes of indisputable joy anywhere I can find them. Challenge accepted.

4. The ICF Professional Certified Coach Markers—Yep. You knew there was going to be a super nerdy coaching deep-dive in here somewhere, and this is it. As I expand my mentor coaching practice, I’m taking The International Coaching Federation’s PCC Marker Assessor Training to further deepen my knowledge of the behaviors that represent demonstration of the Core Competencies in a coaching conversation at the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) level. Watch this space (and LinkedIn) for all my musings as I fully geek out.

5. Sober stints—I’ve done Dry January, Dry July, and Dry Random Month That Felt Like a Good Idea over the years. I’ve also done those caffeine-free at least once annually (though admittedly not since having kids) and have been curious about the actual health benefits behind them. My, um, empirical research showed me that a month without alcohol had me feeling markedly better than before, with a feeling of health and wellbeing that carried me past the designated month as I reintegrated alcohol mindfully (caffeine-free months less so, which is in part why I’ve transitioned out of cycling them through). Not surprisingly, the benefits of taking a break from alcohol correlate with how much someone drinks; and yet even us moderate drinkers can reap benefits. The smattering of articles I read (including these from UC Davis Health, University of Alabama Medicine, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) said a sober stint of even just one month can help improve sleep, weight loss, mood and energy, and can also reduce liver fat and blood pressure. Secondary benefits include the potential positive effect on relationships and finances, as well as possible increased physical activity with all that increased energy. And here I planned to spend mine baking…

If you’re a professional coach looking to earn or renew your ICF ACC or PCC coach credential, this just might be for you!

Learn More and Sign Up

All the ways to work with me:

The Aligned Impact Institute™ — Join the next cohort
One-on-One Coaching — Book a free info call
ICF Mentor Coaching — Join a cohort or sign up for 1:1
Custom Workshops — Learn more & design yours
Not sure which avenue is right for you? Send me a note.

Hello, friends.

Welcome to December, this month of holiday parties, gift shopping, and – for the courageous amongst us – some extended time off.

Why courageous? Well, let me ask you this: have you ever caught yourself saying, “If I can just get through this project/board meeting/trip with my extended family, I’ll be fine” only to notice there’s another “If I can just get through this” immediately on its heels?

Why would we craft this urgent narrative of nonstop busyness that suffocates joy and leads us to throw our shoulder into week after week, to “just get through” our lives?

Despite what our self-sabotaging thoughts tell us, it’s not because we’re unspeakably important, that our work is better than anyone else’s, or that things will fall apart without us. And it’s not because we’re too weak or lazy or irresponsible or undisciplined to manage our workload.

Rather, it’s because of those subconscious fears – those natural human anxieties that we’ve each come by honestly.

The Lynchpin Fallacy

To poorly paraphrase Dr. Kristin Neff, when we over-identify with just one aspect of our identities, we can pin ourselves into tiny boxes of unrealistic expectation that set us up for self-judgment and callousness.1 When we think of ourselves as “The Reliable One,” “The One Who Thrives Under Pressure,” or “The Lynchpin” in various projects and relationships, we give ourselves very little room to breathe.

So why do we do it?

Because that identity has served to keep us safe in the past – whether physically, mentally, emotionally, or all of the above. As children we came to believe that if we acted in accordance with these self-sabotaging demands we’d get our needs met. We often (hopefully) no longer need them as adults; however, the behaviors they’ve engendered after all these years have become second-nature, even if they’re no longer in our best interest.2

So of course we’re going to activate our fear response if we push against those early safety structures that aren’t serving us anymore. If we hang our worth on our ability to handle everything, it makes sense that we’ll feel nervous saying no or taking a break. Who will we be if not “The Responsible One” or “The Lynchpin” or whatever label we gave ourselves and have lived into for so long?

That fear coming up when we consider doing less or taking a break is understandable, and it’s also a breed of discomfort that we can move through. On the other side of worrying if we’ll still be relevant or important if we don’t try to do everything ourselves is a more complex, multifaceted, and human identity. And it turns out that allowing ourselves to be more human brings greater alignment, understanding, and fulfillment…as well as better results and better leadership.

Competing Commitments

As Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey have shown through their research, we possess a psychological immune system made up both of our individual beliefs and our collective community and organizational mindsets.3 And just as our physical immune systems will fight off any perceived threat, so will our psychological immune systems resist change that appears to threaten our deeper commitments or values.

So it’s not that we don’t know intellectually that taking a night off – or even just a 30-min lunch break – is important. We’ve all read the articles touting the benefits of the Pomodoro technique³ and citing studies that report we’ll come back from a quick break more productive and effective than we were before. It’s not a lack of knowledge that keeps us from slowing down any more than it is our importance or our shortcomings.

When people depend on us and we deliver, we receive psychological as well as societal security. We earn awards, we get promoted, we receive still more visibility and influence. Our lizard brains are soothed into believing we’ve earned our place, we matter, and because of that we won’t be cast out and forced to face the uncertainties of life alone. This is a major factor of why we empathetic high achievers hate letting others down.

But that misguided belief traps us in the status quo where we stay in a state of perpetual urgency, sabotaging our own chances of personal and professional growth.

Perspective & Power

Again, we know the benefits of slowing down intellectually. We’ve watched the TedTalks and seen the memes and reels. We know that Adaptive Leadership advocates for us to get off the “dance floor” and onto the “balcony” to gain perspective, see a system clearly, and more accurately diagnose the challenge we’re trying to address.4 And we know we can’t gain that vantage point if we’re overextending ourselves in busyness because we’re too afraid to slow down and take a step back.

So how do we bridge this gap between our intellectual knowing and our very real fear response that has been reinforced and rewarded in our personal and professional lives?

As with many things, I turn to improv for one possible answer.

Early in my improv training my instructor used the analogy of skydiving for co-creating a story on stage in front of a paying audience with no script: to experience something satisfying, you have to brave a little free fall. On the other hand, one of the surest ways to kill a scene is to pull one of three rip cords too quickly: who the characters are to each other, where the scene is taking place, or what the scene is about. Think of the new improviser struck with fear who sets foot on stage and speeds through the following as a clumsy first sentence to their scene partner: “Father, what are you doing in this Starbucks, threatening to publish my middle school diary on Facebook because I scratched your car?”

It’s clunky, prescriptive, unbelievable, and will likely overwhelm any scene partner as they struggle to determine how to respond naturally.

Take a scene my director told me about that’s so vivid an example I still remember it despite not having seen it myself: at the top of a set he jumped on stage with a chair and started typing on a computer.5 At the same moment, a fellow improviser entered pushing a grocery cart. Rather than abandoning their bold choices or naming some outlandish circumstance to try to make sense of the absurd juxtaposition, they stayed in character and leaned into the free fall.

She scoffed and said, “Do you mind?” indicating that he was blocking her progress down the grocery aisle.

He said, “Yeah. I do. This is an important report, and it’s due on Tuesday.”

She sighed and tried to maneuver around him to grab a can from the shelf behind him.

As they let the scene breathe, they slowly discovered – which is to say they co-created – a scenario in which his character lived in the building next to the grocery and had spotty internet. So, every day from 8 to 5 he brought a folding table and chair to telecommute from Aisle 9.

The interaction between that guy and a shopper in a hurry was far more interesting than something one of them might have named out of fear so they could artificially pin down the details and direction of their scene from the start.

And so it is in life and leadership.

Embracing the pause is an act of courage. It creates space for perspective, reflection, and meaning-making. If we practice working through our initial fear of uncertainty, we can make progress in managing the nervousness, doubt, or self-judgment that rushes into the silences we create when we take a few things off our calendars and slow down.

In moving through our discomfort patiently, we can hold these pauses just a little bit longer each time, and thereby cultivate the habit of regular reflection, which will then lead to more intentional action. In so doing, we can increase our clarity, hear our own inner wisdom, and strengthen our capacity for creativity and connection.

We succeed in the being.

Best wishes and happy thoughts,
Katy

1. James I know this masterpiece by Percival Everett won the National Book Award for Fiction back in 2024...and, I just got to it this year, when it won the Pulitzer. Shocker, I agree with all the various awards committees that shortlisted or selected this powerful and inspired “essential companion piece” to Huckleberry Finn for prestigious recognition. It’s an important and deeply moving work by a venerable author of 30+ books.

2. The Bullet Swallower A friend from my MFA program recommended I check out this novel by Elizabeth Gonzales James because he had come across the book while doing comparison studies for his historical novel set in Utah and knows I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This magical realism western that wrestles with

   such formidable questions as “who pays for the sins of our ancestors, and [is it] possible to be better than our forebears” does not disappoint.

3. What We Can Know I posted about this latest from Ian McEwan in my

   November newsletter as I was actively absorbed in its pages. Sure, the foreshadowing is a little heavy in parts, but the complex characters, thorough

   world-building, and riveting questions about the limits of historical and biographical knowledge, much less our own memories and capacity for

   human connection and loyalty kept me eagerly seeking out my reading chair in the few short days it took me to finish the book.

4. The Fifth Season I was amazed to learn that I’d never read this immersive novel by N.K. Jemison that won the Hugo award in 2016 and that the likes of Time and

   Forbes have at the top of their best fantasy novels of all time lists. I fell into all three volumes of the Broken Earth series from end-to-end, gripped by the

   mother-daughter plight of Essun and Nassun amidst the oppressive natural and political dangers of the Stillness.

5. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow This most recent novel from Gabrielle Zevin, the acclaimed author of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (another great read) is at turns endearing and heartbreaking as it follows the 30-year friendship of two young people who “become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.”

All the ways to work with me:

The Aligned Impact Institute™ — Join the next cohort
One-on-One Coaching — Book a free info call
ICF Mentor Coaching — Join a cohort or sign up for 1:1
Custom Workshops — Learn more & design yours
Not sure which avenue is right for you? Send me a note.

Hello, friends.

How are you starting November this year?

For my part, I’m coming off a busy facilitation season on the heels of having the kids home1 for the summer, and am acutely aware of the holidays2 being officially launched with last week’s successful candy collection by our family’s Inflatable Human and Lorax in a Band of Loraxes.

All of which is to say, I’m a little rundown.

I knew it was coming. For the last few weeks, I’ve been a little less patient, more irritable, and distracted. I noticed some scratchiness in my throat and heard myself sighing a lot – you know, those full-body sighs that end in a slump. And my tired eyes stayed unfocused a little longer each day as I cupped my morning coffee and stared into the middle distance.

Since then, and despite my better judgment, my lizard brain has been trying to convince me that skipping workouts, having microwave nachos for dinner, and abandoning most of the stress-reducing activities that Past Me so diligently set up and maintained is a really good, compassionate thing I can do for my Present Self.

Does that sound at all familiar?

Fortunately/unfortunately, I’ve been here before. And at some point, all the coach training and book reading I’ve done starts to float to the surface of my unconscious coping. I remember that our emotions and physical symptoms are data, that our minds and bodies are trying to tell us something when we drift out of alignment, and that with a little intention, we can recalibrate.

So, I’m reminding myself of these key learnings and relearnings that I know help me get back to neutral both personally and professionally.

Practice acceptance.

I’ll be honest–I kind of hate this one. A large part of me is such a driver, so excited by all I want to accomplish that I don’t like it when I feel like I’m being forced to slow down. But once I acknowledge that I’m depleted, another equally present but much quieter part of me sighs in relief.

Checking in on our physical sensations like pain or fatigue, identifying our repetitive thoughts and self-talk, and acknowledging what emotions are present for us is the first step in recovery. It’s not unlike the principles of Adaptive Leadership that encourage us to slow down and spend ample time diagnosing the problem before moving into strategies and behaviors to fix something in organizations that may not be broken.

We have to slow down to gain clarity and identify the right course of action to take.

Don’t let it get any worse, and do a little something to make it better.

As James Clear says, doing something three times in a row is the start of a new habit.5 So if we don’t eat junk for dinner one night, that breaks the pattern of bad eating. And if we don’t eat junk three days in a row, that’s the start of a new habit. Even better, then, if we can muster the forethought and energy to not only not eat junk, but to actually eat well…even if it’s only one meal a day at first. Just a little something to make it better.

For me, that was cooking a triple batch of almond flour pumpkin protein pancakes the other weekend to fill the freezer and give me a healthy toaster breakfast on busy weekdays. A drop in the bucket, perhaps; and also a shift I can build on over the coming days and weeks.

Diversify replenishment activities.

A lot of my clients swear by their morning run and double down when times are particularly stressful. Others consistently default to journalling or sleep.

The reality is that like so many things in life, feeling rundown is often multi-dimensional. If our typical practices aren’t having the impact we’d like, it might be time to try a different kind of replenishment.

I like to think of what I can do to boost my recovery physically, mentally, emotionally, and inspirationally.

Rob Cross, Karen Dillon, and Danna Greenberg identify eight different types of relationships to build our resilience by turning to trusted friends, colleagues, and professionals for different types of interpersonal recovery.6 (These include relationships that provide empathetic support, encourage us to push back and self-advocate, give us perspective, and help us laugh at ourselves, amongst others).

The American Psychological Society identifies four pillars of resilience as connection, wellness, purpose, and embracing healthy thoughts (and provides activities for taking action in each area).7

The point is, whether one of these frameworks resonates with you, you find another, or design your own, there’s value in a multi-faceted approach to recovery. We can all benefit from holistic replenishment, from personal practices as well as leaning on other people, and – of course – consulting with medical and mental health professionals when the need arises.

So it’s fabulous if you’re already watching your diet, exercise, and sleep, talking to a trusted person in your life, practicing mindfulness or breathwork, getting outside, and setting healthy boundaries. And, if you sense you need something more or different, you might try naming your emotions with more specificity than you might normally, experimenting with somatic grounding (like walking barefoot or lying on the ground outside), indulging in creative play or an activity that sparks your sense of humor, or volunteering or engaging in random acts of kindness.

Be present in moments of resetting.

And here’s a kicker: turns out it’s one thing to do replenishment activities, and it’s another to really feel them. I know this, and still

Then I remember that we only benefit if we focus on these activities. If we are fully present in our journalling, time in nature, three deep breaths, you name it, then we amplify their benefit.

For me, because much of my stress comes from ruminating on the past or worrying about the future, this concept from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now often helps: “There is no stress in this moment.”

Look for what’s going right…right now.

Perhaps one of the most common things I see in coaching empathetic high achievers is a focus on how much they have to do and how far they still have to go to reach their goals. To which I often reply, “What’s going right?”

This reorients us to a place of appreciative inquiry and helps us notice the things that are working and that we may have overlooked. Those assets are often the result of previous struggles, which underscores a track record of positive change. And that track record of positive change in the past can give us hope for still more positive change in the future.

As senior lecturer at Purdue University Scott Hutcheson has written,8 hope consists of both agency and identifying different paths to achieve our goals. This combination inspires both action and long-term growth because we orient ourselves toward possibilities, as opposed to obstacles and constraints.

The more we can anchor into what’s going right, the more grateful, motivated, and hopeful we are as we move forward.

Address the cause and plan proactively.

And then, of course, once we’re back to neutral, we regain our powers of creative thought, strategy, and envisioning a better future. We’re better equipped to identify recurrent stressors we might mitigate or eliminate, recognize patterns, and set our future selves up for success by breaking our cycles of overextension.

But for today, perhaps it’s enough to allow space for recalibration and grace, to give ourselves permission to pause.

Because sometimes the first step is sitting still.

1. Beating Our Brain’s Negativity Bias - I’ve respected Dr. Rick Hanson since I first got a copy of his joint project with Dr. Richard Mendius, Meditations to Change Your Brain (on CD – ! – circa 2005). Then just last year, I took his Positive Neuroplasticity Training, which deepened my understanding of how consistent, intentional practice can help us better manage our brain’s innate negativity bias. I’m a huge biology and neuroscience geek as well as a Rick Hanson fan, so I’m looking forward to yet another deep dive by way of his new book, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence. Let me know if you want to join me in a little virtual book club or live conversation, and I’ll make it happen. Feels like more contentment, calm, and confidence could be nice to have as we wrap up the year and head into 2026.

2. Everything LeVar Burton - I’ve loved LeVar Burton since Reading Rainbow, then Roots, then Star Trek. And his Levar Burton Reads podcast was my consistent companion as I drove 90 minutes each way to campus while getting my MFA in Creative Writing from 2018 until the pandemic shut us down. So, imagine my squealing delight when @therealdancraig sent me this encore episode of WildCard with Rachel Martin, “LeVar Burton is learning to embrace the chaos.” He talks of the importance of Being over Doing, of making career decisions aligned with what’s most important to us, and his deep gratitude for having had the opportunity to “portray the Black experience in America from our enslavement to the stars.” I appreciate and admire him so much.

3. Cupping Therapy - You remember all those articles after Michael Phelps and his fellow swimmers were seen at the Rio Olympics sporting multiple round bruises on their backs. That’s about all I knew about cupping therapy until I recently got a Thai massage treatment that included a short cupping therapy session for pain relief, increased mobility, and improved blood flow. It felt great, which got me curious, which led me to this dense but (I think) incredibly interesting study by the NIH: The medical perspective of cupping therapy: Effects and mechanisms of action. Turns out, there’s some preliminary evidence that suggests cupping therapy may also strengthen our immune systems and reduce inflammation. Maybe that’s why my Celiac-Disease-tightened back appreciated it so much!

4. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan - If you’re like me, Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, and a riveting, 12-year-old, and soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated Saoirse Ronan captured your attention in the trailer for the 2007 film adaptation of Atonement, sending you straight to the work of Ian McEwan in order to read the novel before the film’s debut. How wonderful, then, to read this in Dwight Garner’s New York Times Book Review: “the novel this [What We Can Know] most resembles, its historical sensibility, its metafictional touches and its jumping back and forth in time, is his stately 2001 classic, Atonement.” A new McEwan work compared to the deft and complex narrative of human failings that first introduced me to his work? Yes, please.

5. The Anatomy of Peace - I was first exposed to The Arbinger Institute’s The Anatomy of Peace in 2016 when I was in The Co-Active Training Institute’s 9-month leadership program. It discusses, among many other valuable concepts, how we must first come to a place of inner peace before engaging in dialogue with others if we hope to achieve outer peace. This helped me identify when my mindset about myself and others was perpetuating the very conflicts I was trying to resolve. And, because so many practices are easier said than done, and I’m continuously trying to live, work, lead, vote, parent, and influence change with a “heart at peace” rather than “a heart at war,” I dusted it off for another deep dive this fall.

Enthusiastically announcing and welcoming you to join my new signature program:

Learn More and Join the Cohort

All the ways to work with me:

The Aligned Impact Institute™ — Join the next cohort
One-on-One Coaching — Book a free info call
ICF Mentor Coaching — Join a cohort or sign up for 1:1
Custom Workshops — Learn more & design yours
Not sure which avenue is right for you? Send me a note.

Thank you for joining me here as I launch this new endeavor in support of equipping ambitious minds for aligned living.

As many of you know, I’ve been coaching in one way or another for my whole career. I started by coordinating an internship program while I was still in college, then helped with newsletters and oral history projects for solopreneurs and city governments, then worked at a university where students would often ask me what classes they should take. When I started that job I was only 23, and I remember responding to one student with zero filter: “I don’t know. What do you like?”

This started more resonant and fulfilling conversations, as I started asking people like you from all different backgrounds and places, what lit them up. That resonance continued to guide me as I moved into nonprofit work and ultimately started coaching empathetic high achievers across all kinds of industries. Through those experiences I learned that whatever it is in school, work, or life that makes us feel most alive, it’s usually something we’re good at, something we’re passionate about, and something we’re likely to make a positive impact through.

And yet, it can seem so natural, so fluid, or even so indulgent that we don’t always recognize it.1

I was my own case in point: I entered college as an International Business Major because that felt important in my 18-year-old worldview, and I figured it was something that would make my parents, my teachers, and my scholarship providers proud. But then I had an 8am Econ class with a professor I’m sure was brilliant but who spoke in a soporific monotone. And I had an epiphany as obvious as most epiphanies are when we finally feel their truth: “If I’m going to major in something,” I thought, “I’m going to have to take a lot of classes in it. And OMG, then I’ll work in that field for years. I better like what I pick.”

So, I walked to the registrar and switched my major to French right after that first class. Now, I had the privilege of a scholarship and some great French and AP teachers in my past, so I knew I loved the language and had time to get a second, “more practical” major within my four years of scholarship. But still, even with that luxury and safety net, I wasn’t yet confident enough to tell anyone I was “Undecided” while I figured things out. Having a declared major felt “Responsible” which was something I wanted to be, even though at the time that was weighted with others’ interpretations of the word.

So what’s my point? (I do have one, I promise).

We all have moments when we doubt ourselves or lose our way. When we can’t see ourselves clearly or don’t know where we want to go or who we want to become.

Despite triple-majoring and always working two, three, sometimes four jobs at once, I didn’t see myself as disciplined. I judged myself for not focusing, for not being as consistent or dependable as those I admired for such things. I called myself a career hobbyist as I applied for positions I thought I could stay in for a few years–places where I could work hard and do good things to benefit others while learning something new before moving on.

It took me years to learn (and relearn) that my ability to connect disparate ideas while others focused on one at a time was a gift. That I wasn’t inconsistent; I was present and spontaneous. I was able to respond to whatever arose in each moment–and each person. I was able to design and execute plans, and also to let them go when circumstances changed and those plans no longer applied. I was connected and adaptive and fiercely confident in others’ capacity. And when that sometimes led to disappointment or cyclical burnout, I learned (and relearned) how to be resilient and strengthen my empathy and respect for others with healthy boundaries.

And I wasn’t alone. I coached others who also didn’t yet know (or had forgotten) what lit them up. Who were unsure of who they were or wanted to become and sometimes let others’ expectations influence them too much. Who wanted to help others so much they didn’t always say no when they could have and wanted to and ran through cycles of burnout themselves. Who cared about impact and quality so much that they overextended themselves and didn’t always trust others enough to delegate. Or conversely, who trusted people so much and so hated the idea of micromanaging another human being that they sometimes left others hanging without enough direction.

We learned (and relearned) together.

I kept taking classes and reading books to be better myself2 and to be more helpful to the earnest, well-meaning, hard-working people I got to speak with. And before I knew it, 25 years had passed since that first post-grad job advising students at the age of 23.

In this, that 25th year, I earned my Master Coach Certification with the International Coaching Federation and am marking my 10th year of owning my own coaching and facilitation business with a new brand and positioning to better own and reflect how my coaching has evolved.

Thank you for learning (and relearning and relearning) alongside me all these years. My intention with this Substack is to build community, to connect with you more often, and to share some of the brightest insights from my continued research and conversation–both to share the wealth, and also to feed the dialogue.

As always, you are at the heart of my work. Please message me if you’re grappling with or insatiably curious about anything and would like to read about it here as I delve into various topics related to aligned life and leadership.

Rumor has it this is also a great place for shorter content, so I’ll likely be experimenting with a light dose of that alongside the monthly newsletter. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you’d like more or less of anything. I am–as always–looking forward to co-creating with you.

Thank you for being here.

Best wishes and happy thoughts,
Katy

Enthusiastically announcing and welcoming you to join my new signature program:

Learn More and Join the Cohort

All the ways to work with me:

The Aligned Impact Institute™ — Join the next cohort
One-on-One Coaching — Book a free info call
ICF Mentor Coaching — Join a cohort or sign up for 1:1
Custom Workshops — Learn more & design yours
Not sure which avenue is right for you? Send me a note.

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